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Guest petesasqwax

Is there a single release that pushed you over the edge and made you think "fuck - I can totally do this"?

I don't really mean it in the sense of: "if THEY can do it, I sure as shit can" (although drop that if it's applicable), I mean it more like the thing that inspired to you really want to do it yourself.

For me I had been obsessed with the likes of Prince Paul for years, but I didn't really know any rappers and although I loved a good drunken freestyle session as much as the next fool, I had no aspirations of really rhyming myself. I was vaguely aware of Mo'Wax, had the Deep Concentration album and the Audio Alchemy compilation on Ubiquity, but it wasn't until I head Dibbs' "231 Ways To Rock" that I really started to understand that it didn't matter about verse/chorus type bullshit and you could just do whatever the fuck you wanted as long as it was dope. I know that sounds totally obvious now, but at the time it was a huge revelation.

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For me it was seeing DJs like 2tall and C2C use records that weren't typical hip hop records in dmc and combine Turntablism with other genres in their respective productions that made me realise I could attempt the same and make routines/incorporate Turntablism with music outside of hip hop :)

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It was a combination of listening to the DJ Jazzy Jeff tracks on "He's the DJ, I'm the Rapper" and the fact that I somehow randomly bought a Technics 1200 without knowing that it was "the" turntable that got me to the point of "I can do this". Me and a friend used to skip through that album and listen to Jeff's tracks just trying to figure out what he was doing. We had no idea about DJing or anything about the scene, break records, any of that. We started using a mixer, a CD player for playing beats of CD singles, and one 1200. The Flash Gordon soundtrack was my scratch record.

 

By the time I started hearing all the shit that was going on in the scene I was like "damn, maybe I can't do this" haha.

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Hearing Public Enemy's 'Fear Of A Black Planet' in 1990 made me desperately want to own a sampler back in the day but they were way too expensive for someone like myself to afford back then so I forgot about it.

 

Sometime around 1992 I met a dude who was working as an apprentice engineer at one of the big recording studios near to where I lived and he ended up getting loads of downtime in the smaller 8 track studio they had there and he asked me if id like to come down and have a play with the bits of kit they had in there ( various synths and drum machines etcetera )

 

They also had an Akai S1000 (I think) rack sampler in there too so I obviously jumped at the chance to get in there and have a bash at recording something.

 

I took a handfull of records there and we looped bits of them up and eventually ended up with track that we were pretty pleased with...I remember that we assigned the samples to a Roland Juno 106 that had been midi retrofitted and being really impressed at the manipulations that you could make with the sampled sounds.

 

Also the sounds off the Original Gangster lp by Ice T and the early Mo Wax stuff was definitely an inspiration to get in the sampling game and eventually I got my first sampler which was the Roland MS 1 and an Alesis MMT-8 sequencer thing,a Roland D-5 synth which was rubbish and a cheap portastudio and started making my own tracks around 1995 ish.

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Guest petesasqwax

Ha! JB - I didn't have the cash for 2 1210s so I just had one for ages. I learned how to beatmatch by mixing 12"s in to CDs & learned how to cut by buying CD singles and scratching over the instrumentals

Dan - that's dope. Do you still have a tape of the track??

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My route into dj'ing as a teenager was simply I never quite liked 100% the selection of the usual hardcore/drum and bass heavyweights - I was buying records anyway so thought I might as well make my own mixes.

It's also almost exactly 20 years since I bought my original pair of SL1210s. I'm officially old.

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Dan - that's dope. Do you still have a tape of the track??

Haha yeah, absolutely. Ive still got the original cassette dubbing I made in a box with some other early things I recorded.

 

Its weird because I really dont like the tune anymore but Alecs plays it a lot when hes doing DJ gigs and apparently it goes down really well with the crowd..( honestly mate ,I seriously thought he was joking when he told me that )

 

Id be bloody mortified if I had to play it to any of you lot though because it sounds like James Brown meets The Future Sound Of London in hell..in dub..

and they're not exactly getting along with each other all too well.

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Did you have a local record shop/pusher where you'd get the classic 3 needle drop dnb listen? In Southampton there was a shop called Tripp2 and it was always "intro" "build" "drop" - I never bought any shit from there as I wasn't a major dnb head,but I would stand there with friends whilst money was sucked out of their bank accounts

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Guest petesasqwax

 

Dan - that's dope. Do you still have a tape of the track??

Haha yeah, absolutely. Ive still got the original cassette dub I made in a box with some other early things I recorded.

 

Its weird because I really dont like the tune anymore but Alecs plays it a lot when hes doing DJ gigs and apparently it goes down really well with the crowd..( honestly mate ,I seriously thought he was joking when he told me that )

 

Id be bloody mortified if I had to play it to any of you lot though because it sounds like James Brown meets The Future Sound Of London in hell,in dub, and they're not getting along with each other all too well...

 

Ah, man - I need to hear it! It can't be that bad - the first tracks I ever recorded involved me rapping!

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Guest Symatic

darcy told me I had to put some stuff on wax.... before that i thought there was some secret thing where certain people had the knowledge and everyone else was outside of the magic circle. i wasted about 10 years....

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Pete - I dont even particularly like the music I make now 22 years later hahaha so im definitely not playing it to you !

 

Did you insist on having your baseball cap on backwards when you used to rap btw ?

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Ha! JB - I didn't have the cash for 2 1210s so I just had one for ages. I learned how to beatmatch by mixing 12"s in to CDs & learned how to cut by buying CD singles and scratching over the instrumentals

 

Dan - that's dope. Do you still have a tape of the track??

 

This is where the roommate advantage kicked in for me. Neither one of us could afford a whole setup. After various attempts by my roommate to find a decent used deck, he bit the bullet and put a new 1200 on his credit card. Within a few months we had a full setup. We were able to find an cheap, used ATUS mixer with a crossfader. Every six months we traded off who got the decks in their room. Oddly enough it worked pretty good. Eventually we saved up enough to each get our own gear.

 

I started out thinking DJing was this dead art and I was just making mixtapes for myself using whatever records I could find. I think this really shaped how I approach everything now. I still just experiment with whatever I happen to get my hands on and make stuff for myself.

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hehe - I've never rocked a baseball cap backwards, mate - always skewed at an angle! There's actually a fair handful of things I've rapped on kicking around out there

 

https://waxfactoryrecords.bandcamp.com/track/working-on-my-mullet-faster-than-a-speeding-mullet-mix

*this may or may not be one of them ;)

 

I LOVE shit like this. It's just so far off the beaten path and sounds like some motherfuckers just got high and locked themselves in a room for the day to see what happens.

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Guest petesasqwax

 

hehe - I've never rocked a baseball cap backwards, mate - always skewed at an angle! There's actually a fair handful of things I've rapped on kicking around out there

 

https://waxfactoryrecords.bandcamp.com/track/working-on-my-mullet-faster-than-a-speeding-mullet-mix

*this may or may not be one of them ;)

 

I LOVE shit like this. It's just so far off the beaten path and sounds like some motherfuckers just got high and locked themselves in a room for the day to see what happens.

 

HAHA! Word - that's EXACTLY what happened, except kill the pluralisation. ONE person got high and locked himself in a room for the day... and the original version of it got played on Mary Anne Hobbs' Radio 1 show... All this shit was a lot more simple back then!

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hmmmmmmmm I think for me it was back in the 90's and my older cousin used to give me rave tapes. I loved it on first listen but for some reason I thought the DJ had separate decks for each sound, so a vinyl with the hi-hats, one for the kick, bass line etc (no really) and I thought it would be really cool to be able to do that and make my own tracks. (In my defence i think i was about 10 and I'd never heard anything like it before)

 

Then he showed me the "Demos" on the Amiga and I was blown away. I got OctaMED on a magazine disk and somehow got loads of mod files. I'd sit for hours listening to them, then they would be bits I like that I wanted to extend so I started to work out how to do that, it was hard going at first! I remember i really wanted to get something released on vinyl on the warp label, purely because they were in Sheffield!

 

What really kick started it was when my Mom bought a PC when I was about 16 and I discovered fruity loops, hammerhead, Reason and Live. that's when I started trying to make hip-hop beats and I still try to this day!

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Guest Symatic

hmmmmmmmm I think for me it was back in the 90's and my older cousin used to give me rave tapes. I loved it on first listen but for some reason I thought the DJ had separate decks for each sound, so a vinyl with the hi-hats, one for the kick, bass line etc (no really) and I thought it would be really cool to be able to do that and make my own tracks. (In my defence i think i was about 10 and I'd never heard anything like it before)

 

 

haha thats almost an exact description of my 10 year old self too :) except i thought that the 3 eq knobs were for "bassline" "drums" and "vocals" and you could just remix tracks like that on the fly...... but i also thought that every time the prodigy dropped a beastie boys or kool keith sample they were playing it straight off the turntable every time :)

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hmmmmmmmm I think for me it was back in the 90's and my older cousin used to give me rave tapes. I loved it on first listen but for some reason I thought the DJ had separate decks for each sound, so a vinyl with the hi-hats, one for the kick, bass line etc (no really) and I thought it would be really cool to be able to do that and make my own tracks. (In my defence i think i was about 10 and I'd never heard anything like it before)

 

Then he showed me the "Demos" on the Amiga and I was blown away. I got OctaMED on a magazine disk and somehow got loads of mod files. I'd sit for hours listening to them, then they would be bits I like that I wanted to extend so I started to work out how to do that, it was hard going at first! I remember i really wanted to get something released on vinyl on the warp label, purely because they were in Sheffield!

 

What really kick started it was when my Mom bought a PC when I was about 16 and I discovered fruity loops, hammerhead, Reason and Live. that's when I started trying to make hip-hop beats and I still try to this day!

 

Haha, yeah, I was a little disappointed when I figured out that Jazzy Jeff wasn't actually mixing all that stuff live (except for "Live From Union Square" of course).

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Guest petesasqwax

Then he showed me the "Demos" on the Amiga and I was blown away. I got OctaMED on a magazine disk and somehow got loads of mod files. I'd sit for hours listening to them, then they would be bits I like that I wanted to extend so I started to work out how to do that, it was hard going at first!

Haha! No way! The first time I saw production software it was Octamed on an A500! Nic and James made their Superdense Child stuff on it and went from pissing around to getting signed in what seemed like a matter of months. I went down to Virgin Megastore - the only place in Southampton (where I was living at the time) that had any kind of PC software and they had a music making programme called Magix Music Maker so I got that and started messing with stuff using that. I figured out sampling using Windows Media Recorder and soon I was sampling my own stuff instead of using the sounds that came with the programme. I got a new sound card at some point which came with SF Acid and that was the next step.

 

I didn't have the "different record for each sound" confusion, but I do remember that the first time I found samples from hiphop tracks on records I heard elsewhere totally blew my mind. I realised that I had previously had no idea whatsoever how the tracks had been made at that point!

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I didn't have the "different record for each sound" confusion, but I do remember that the first time I found samples from hiphop tracks on records I heard elsewhere totally blew my mind. I realised that I had previously had no idea whatsoever how the tracks had been made at that point!

 

 

I remember that "this is from a hip-hop track" to which my dad would say "this track is 20 years old" (or summat) i would then think "ohhhhhh that's how they do it!"

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